You’re not just creating something; creativity is who you are and what you do. You're always creating things in your domain. Nonstop. Constantly.
A distillation of what @naval, @shl, and @benthompson said about the creator economy on Clubhouse this weekend:
You’re not just creating something; creativity is who you are and what you do. You're always creating things in your domain. Nonstop. Constantly.
Most successful creators are tinkerers. They just play at the edges of their field on something that’s interesting to them, but they don’t do it with a strong motive. They’re genuinely interested.
But once in a while, it will result in something that might be a hobby. And for an adult, it might be a vocation.
Sometimes it gets drilled out of you, but humans are creative. Nobody wants to sit there and do nothing all day (that gets boring). A big part of success is finding your natural self-directed curiosity and following it.
In the past, there were just were fewer creators. Now, many more people can participate in the creative act.
Step one was a creator on the internet.
Step two was a creator on the social networks.
Step three is a creator on the tools for cross-network monetization.
Beyond laborer and capitalist, the highest form is creator. Everyone's either creating code or media or products. In that sense, the Creator Economy is the apotheosis.
You'd fly to another city to speak at an event with 400 people. 400 people subscribing to your newsletter for $10 a month is a living for almost anybody in the world.
Once your creativity is demonstrated, everybody wants a piece of your time. The tradeoff is you can no longer be creative.
For me, it’s the consistent disciplined application of thinking that leads to breakthroughs.
This is all meant to be inspiration. Don't take it too literally. You can't follow anybody else's path to success. It’s a single player game.
You’re the most creative on your own or with one or two thought partners maximum. Once you get past that point, you're not going to be creative anymore.
They're not going to understand you need large blocks of alone time or with a partner. Brainstorming and coding and writing are largely solitary or at best pairwise activities.
You have to be downright rude about protecting your time so you can do solitary or pairwise work.
Doing that helps people know when to ask you things. It builds your brand, it leans into your superpower, it’s more enjoyable, it puts you in flow more often, and it’s more efficient.
Yes, only one person can be the top of the leaderboard, but you can have many, many leaderboards.
But that's not necessarily a cause for alarm if you can meet your basic needs.
Even if you’re only average, you can differentiate by talking about a particular topic and filling a niche. It’s an opportunity to be the only one doing something.
If you're overly concerned with the status hierarchy, you'll never be satisfied. But if you're fine with the wealth hierarchy and only need to hit a certain threshold, we can all get there.
What the world craves is authenticity, and few people are authentic. Deep down, people know when someone is putting on a show. People crave truth and when they find someone who is speaking their truth, that’s naturally attractive.
Some companies have product-market fit and the founder is passionate. Other companies don’t have it and the founders aren't that passionate. Then they find product-market fit and suddenly everybody's passionate.
When you find the hardest things in your domain, you can hone yourself against those and get even stronger.
If you fixate 5-10 years in the future, the danger is you succeed and end up in a place that’s not relevant or interesting.
Often when you get distracted by where you want to go, you don’t take advantage of the spot you’re in.
It's more about thinking and absorbing, walking around and learning. I don't know where the ideas will come from, but they’ll come.
Next thing you know, you're connecting things together. Most ideas are nonsense, a few stick, you brand them and figure out how to execute on them.
That’s not to say you shouldn't have goals and plans, but if you stick too closely to them, you'll miss reality.
For every 100 companies I’ve seriously made an effort at starting, one has gotten launched. You're just constantly trying stuff and iterating.
These are variations on a theme: try a lot of stuff, get feedback, see what works, and stick with that.
Wisdom naturally brings peace and peace naturally brings happiness. If peace in motion is happiness, we just need to give it some time.
I don't think of myself as a critical thinker. I’m just a person. If you're a critical thinker, that’s a big mantle to bear.
Just go through life. Enjoy it. If you’re healthy and have a roof over your head, you're doing great.
You're getting the brightest people in the world who've dedicated their lives to their craft. They work day-and-night and compete on a winner-take-all playing field, where #1 wins everything, #2 gets something, and #3 loses it all.
You don't show up to build anything serious unless you’re going all in with an A-class team.
They have to be just as passionate as you, and they have to be incredibly skilled. Why would they want to work with you in the first place?
You have to track down the top athletes in the space, then you have to convince them to work with you, then you have to convince them to spend their time on it, then you have to convince them they should keep you.
The value is in the writing and the difficulty is in the creation.
If you want to master something, it has to be something you’re obsessed with. It has to be your life.
When that happens, you need to get out of that situation and get to where you can control your own life.
You eventually want to get to a point where Mondays are no worse and no better than any other day.
To use the old Robert Frost phrase, you unite your avocation with your vocation.
When there are so many nonlinear upsides floating around, and you want to take bets until you find one that goes nonlinear, the proper philosophical approach is rational optimism.
We still have to iterate our way to the one percent that’s useful, but in an ideal world where we were omniscient, we’d just cut our way to the one percent.
But as we get older, instead of taking 100 shots on goal to get to the one that works, we get better at narrowing it down.
The ability to say no and be correct is a superpower.
Eventually when you have judgment you should be saying no all the time.
-Outsource anything that’s less than your aspirational hourly rate (labor leverage).
-Invest behind your decisions to multiply the force you’re exerting (capital leverage).
-Code, write, or make something with zero marginal cost of replication (product leverage).
The market is gonna try it all.
If you do that, then you pass up on the fruits of it, and the fruits of it are tantalizing. It’s like capitalism or tech. You can squish it in your country, but it will cost you.
Where we had networks of abundance and didn’t know how to govern it, we did it with a dictator or a sovereign or a corporation. Now we have a way to do that with users in charge.
It's like being stuck in a form of communism when the rest of the world is moving to capitalism, and that difference will become more and more stark over time.
VCs only used to invest in hardware and the idea of investing in ephemeral software was ludicrous. The next thing comes along (crypto), and people think it's a hallucination.
Bitcoin only has value if other people think it has value. Art and bitcoin have value when people exchange it for things we agree have value.
Legacy companies will have to become new organizations built from first principles.
It can interface at some points, and those points can be valuable, but those interface points are still on the edge of where crypto operates. Crypto wants to operate in an all-digital, on-chain, all-crypto domain.
Everything in the world is a non-fungible token; it’s fungibility that’s rare.
Almost everything you see in the manmade world is a non-fungible token. There's an infinite amount of art. The question is, how do you stand out?
You still have to build a social consensus around your piece of art that it will hold value in a distinct way from the next 100 million pieces of art that have just shown up.
Other people have to agree the stuff you’ve created is valuable, even though it’s not inherently valuable.
That’s the hard part, and NFTs aren’t going to give you that part. The true non-fungible asset is your audience. You can’t give it to anybody else even if you wanted to.
Your brand doesn't matter. VCs have the hardest sales job in the world: they have to brand money.
VCs have developed a black art in creating, signaling, and transferring status on companies. If you see through that as an entrepreneur, you can get great bargains
20 years ago, it was mostly investors taking advantage of entrepreneurs.
A lot of people who are happy to invest $100 million in a DeFi protocol and they wouldn’t know where to start with a YC company.
What you don't want is a large number of people who are half-interested.
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There is co-ordination across the far right in Ireland now to stir both left and right in the hopes of creating a race war. Think critically! Fascists see the tragic killing of #georgenkencho, the grief of his community and pending investigation as a flashpoint for action.
Across Telegram, Twitter and Facebook disinformation is being peddled on the back of these tragic events. From false photographs to the tactics ofwhite supremacy, the far right is clumsily trying to drive hate against minority groups and figureheads.
Declan Ganley’s Burkean group and the incel wing of National Party (Gearóid Murphy, Mick O’Keeffe & Co.) as well as all the usuals are concerted in their efforts to demonstrate their white supremacist cred. The quiet parts are today being said out loud.
The best thing you can do is challenge disinformation and report posts where engagement isn’t appropriate. Many of these are blatantly racist posts designed to drive recruitment to NP and other Nationalist groups. By all means protest but stay safe.
There is co-ordination across the far right in Ireland now to stir both left and right in the hopes of creating a race war. Think critically! Fascists see the tragic killing of #georgenkencho, the grief of his community and pending investigation as a flashpoint for action.
Across Telegram, Twitter and Facebook disinformation is being peddled on the back of these tragic events. From false photographs to the tactics ofwhite supremacy, the far right is clumsily trying to drive hate against minority groups and figureheads.
Be aware, the images the #farright are sharing in the hopes of starting a race war, are not of the SPAR employee that was punched. They\u2019re older photos of a Everton fan. Be aware of the information you\u2019re sharing and that it may be false. Always #factcheck #GeorgeNkencho pic.twitter.com/4c9w4CMk5h
— antifa.drone (@antifa_drone) December 31, 2020
Declan Ganley’s Burkean group and the incel wing of National Party (Gearóid Murphy, Mick O’Keeffe & Co.) as well as all the usuals are concerted in their efforts to demonstrate their white supremacist cred. The quiet parts are today being said out loud.
There is a concerted effort in far-right Telegram groups to try and incite violence on street by targetting people for racist online abuse following the killing of George Nkencho
— Mark Malone (@soundmigration) January 1, 2021
This follows on and is part of a misinformation campaign to polarise communities at this time.
The best thing you can do is challenge disinformation and report posts where engagement isn’t appropriate. Many of these are blatantly racist posts designed to drive recruitment to NP and other Nationalist groups. By all means protest but stay safe.
Department List of UCAS-China PROFESSORs for ANSO, CSC and UCAS (fully or partial) Scholarship Acceptance
1) UCAS School of physical sciences Professor
https://t.co/9X8OheIvRw
2) UCAS School of mathematical sciences Professor
3) UCAS School of nuclear sciences and technology
https://t.co/nQH8JnewcJ
4) UCAS School of astronomy and space sciences
https://t.co/7Ikc6CuKHZ
5) UCAS School of engineering
6) Geotechnical Engineering Teaching and Research Office
https://t.co/jBCJW7UKlQ
7) Multi-scale Mechanics Teaching and Research Section
https://t.co/eqfQnX1LEQ
😎 Microgravity Science Teaching and Research
9) High temperature gas dynamics teaching and research section
https://t.co/tVIdKgTPl3
10) Department of Biomechanics and Medical Engineering
https://t.co/ubW4xhZY2R
11) Ocean Engineering Teaching and Research
12) Department of Dynamics and Advanced Manufacturing
https://t.co/42BKXEugGv
13) Refrigeration and Cryogenic Engineering Teaching and Research Office
https://t.co/pZdUXFTvw3
14) Power Machinery and Engineering Teaching and Research
1) UCAS School of physical sciences Professor
https://t.co/9X8OheIvRw
2) UCAS School of mathematical sciences Professor
3) UCAS School of nuclear sciences and technology
https://t.co/nQH8JnewcJ
4) UCAS School of astronomy and space sciences
https://t.co/7Ikc6CuKHZ
5) UCAS School of engineering
6) Geotechnical Engineering Teaching and Research Office
https://t.co/jBCJW7UKlQ
7) Multi-scale Mechanics Teaching and Research Section
https://t.co/eqfQnX1LEQ
😎 Microgravity Science Teaching and Research
9) High temperature gas dynamics teaching and research section
https://t.co/tVIdKgTPl3
10) Department of Biomechanics and Medical Engineering
https://t.co/ubW4xhZY2R
11) Ocean Engineering Teaching and Research
12) Department of Dynamics and Advanced Manufacturing
https://t.co/42BKXEugGv
13) Refrigeration and Cryogenic Engineering Teaching and Research Office
https://t.co/pZdUXFTvw3
14) Power Machinery and Engineering Teaching and Research